Work Items and Work Item Types Overview
Microsoft Visual Studio Team System delivers capabilities that help enterprise software development teams manage their work using items such as bugs, requirements, tasks, risks, and so on. These items are referred to generically as work items.
The work item is a fundamental object in Visual Studio Team System. Work items can be of different types. A work item type defines the data that is collected for a work item by using fields and field rules, how that data is presented to a user by using a form, and the workflow that work item undergoes by using a state-transition model.
In Visual Studio Team System, a team's work is organized around team projects. Work item types and their corresponding work items are organized under team projects. All this information is stored in a single Team Foundation Server. Therefore, a work item type is scoped to a team project and stored on a Team Foundation Server.
Multiple team projects can share the same definition of a work item type, and the name of the work item type can even be the same between projects, but over time, administrators of team projects can choose to independently change work item type definitions.